Leon Trotsky

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Leon Trotsky
Лев Троцкий
Trotsky in 1918
People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the Soviet Union[a]
In office 14 March 1918 – 12 January 1925
Premier	Vladimir Lenin Alexei Rykov
Preceded by	Nikolai Podvoisky
Succeeded by	Mikhail Frunze
People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Russian SFSR
In office 8 November 1917 – 13 March 1918
Premier	Vladimir Lenin
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Georgy Chicherin
Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet
In office 20 September 1917 – 26 December 1917
Preceded by	Nikolay Chkheidze
Succeeded by	Grigory Zinoviev
Personal details
Born	Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-11-07)7 November 1879 (N.S.) Yanovka, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died	21 August 1940(1940-08-21) (aged 60) Mexico City, Mexico
Manner of death	Assassination
Resting place	Leon Trotsky House Museum, Mexico City, Mexico
Citizenship	Soviet Union (1922–1932) Stateless (from 1932)
Political party	Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1898–1917) Mezhraiontsy (1917)[1] All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1918–1927)
Spouses	Aleksandra Sokolovskaya ​ ​ (m. 1899; div. 1902)​ Natalia Sedova ​ (m. 1903)​
Children	Zinaida Nina Lev Sergei
Signature
Leon Trotsky's voice Recorded 1920
Central institution membership 1917–1927: Full member, 6th–14th Politburo of AUCP(b) 1917–1927: Full member, 6th–14th Central Committee of AUCP(b) 1919–1920: Full member, 8th Orgburo of RCP(b) 1923–1924: Full member, 12th Orgburo of RCP(b) 1910–1912: Full member, 5th Central Committee of RSDLP Other offices held 1905: Chairman, St. Petersburg Soviet 1917: Chairman, Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee 1917–1918: Member of the Russian Constituent Assembly for Novgorod 1918: Chairman, Supreme Military Council 1918–1925: Chairman, Revolutionary Military Council

Lev Davidovich Bronstein^[b] (7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,^[c] was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution of 1917, Russian Civil War, and the establishment of the Soviet Union, from which he was exiled in 1929 before his assassination in 1940. Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered the two most prominent figures in the Soviet state from 1917 until Lenin's death in 1924. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, Trotsky's ideas inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.

Born into a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898. He was arrested and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin. Trotsky initially sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks in the party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904. During the 1905 Revolution, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and lived abroad. After the February Revolution of 1917, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He helped lead the October Revolution, and as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. He served as People's Commissar for Military Affairs from 1918 to 1925, during which he built the Red Army and led it to victory in the civil war. In 1922, Lenin formed a bloc with Trotsky against the growing Soviet bureaucracy^[3] and proposed that he become a deputy premier,^[4] but Trotsky declined.^[5] Beginning in 1923, Trotsky led the party's Left Opposition faction, which opposed the market concessions of the New Economic Policy.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky emerged as a prominent critic of Joseph Stalin, who soon politically outmaneuvered him. Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927, exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937. In exile, Trotsky wrote polemics against Stalinism, advocating proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution held that the revolution could only survive if spread to more advanced capitalist countries. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), he argued that the Soviet Union had become a "degenerated workers' state", and in 1938 founded the Fourth International as an alternative to the Comintern. After being sentenced to death in absentia at the Moscow show trials in 1936, Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.

Written out of official history under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of his rivals who was never politically rehabilitated by later Soviet leaders. In the West, Trotsky emerged as a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for his defense of a more democratic, internationalist form of socialism^[6][7] against Stalinist totalitarianism, and for his intellectual contributions to Marxism. While some of his wartime actions are controversial, such as his ideological defence of the Red Terror^[8] and violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, scholarship ranks Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army highly among historical figures, and he is credited for his major involvement with the military, economic, cultural^[9] and political development of the Soviet Union.

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